On Language

Their Infernal Priggery Aside, the Brits Couldn't Do It Without Us

By JESSE SHEIDLOWER

Published: September 9, 2001

That Americans are the worst thing that has ever happened to the English language has never been doubted by many Brits, from Prince Charles on down. And while we are indeed responsible for the high quality of our slang and for an unfortunate predilection for using like as a form of punctuation, Americans, I am here to say, are not all bad for English. The ultimate repository for the history of the language is greatly indebted to Americans for much of what makes the Oxford English Dictionary what it is: the citations, or the quotations of language that illustrate the use of every sense of every word in the O.E.D. ''Every quotation,'' wrote Dr. Johnson in the preface to his great Dictionary of the English Language, ''contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language,'' and so for the O.E.D. finding good citations is its primary goal.

While linguists now have phenomenal electronic resources, the need for skilled citation collectors is as strong as ever. One reason is that many texts of interest -- comic books, movie scripts, even modern novels -- are simply not available electronically. But the main reason is that most new usages and shifts in meaning can only be recognized by the human eye. There is something new about the common word so in a sentence like ''That so was a lame party'' that a computer can't pick up, and even if you know to look for it, you would have to go through thousands of other examples of so to find the one you need.

Thus, the citation reader. All dictionaries are based on citations to some extent, but none have the need -- or the resources -- that the O.E.D. does. Tens of thousands of quotations pour in every month from around the world. A small but dedicated force reads through sources old and new -- books, TV scripts, journals and magazines from The New Yorker and Time to Pennsylvania Wine Traveler and Bead &#38; Button.

The American contribution to the O.E.D. is almost as old as the dictionary itself. Only a year after the plan for a historical dictionary of English was formulated, a Vermont scholar and politician named George P. Marsh was appointed the head of the American effort. ''It is generally known to literary men in the United States,'' he wrote in 1859, ''that the Philological Society, of London, has been for some time engaged in the preparation of a complete lexicon or thesaurus of the English language. The Society having determined to ask the aid of American scholars in this enterprise, the subscriber has been requested to act as Secretary in America.''

With good editions of early English texts unavailable in America, ''it has been deemed best to recommend to American contributors the study of a later period, and for that purpose the entire body of English literature belonging to the 18th century has been reserved for their perusal'' (emphasis in original). With this convenient excuse, the English were able to stick their American friends with the most boring century in modern literary history, but someone had to do it.

And American readers, especially academics, were so devoted to their task that the chief editor, James Murray, not only praised them but also went out of his way to criticize his British colleagues in comparison: ''There is another feature of American help to which I must allude, because it contrasts with that we have obtained in England -- I refer to that offered to the Dictionary by men of Academic standing in the States. The number of Professors in American Universities and Colleges included among our readers is very large. . . . We have had no such help from any college or university in Great Britain.''

By the time work on the dictionary was well under way, Americans had more than proved their worth. The most famous citation reader in the O.E.D.'s history was an American, Dr. W.C. Minor, whose amazing story -- a surgeon during the Civil War, he had gone insane and murdered a stranger on the streets of London, living out his days contributing tens of thousands of important citations from a book-filled cell at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum -- was told in Simon Winchester's masterly best seller, ''The Professor and the Madman.''

Reading continues apace. In 1990, the dictionary established the North American Reading Program, under the guidance of Jeffery Triggs, who instituted the collection of citations in an electronic database, thus eliminating the problem of scribbling out, filing and storing millions of 4-by-6 slips of paper. The culmination of the O.E.D.'s dedication to the study of American English came in 1999, with the founding of the separate North American Editorial Unit, which will ensure that Oxford has a base of research for American, Canadian and Caribbean English. (While other countries -- Australia and South Africa, for example -- have university-financed dictionary centers that can feed research into the O.E.D., American lexicography has traditionally been dominated by commercial publishers, who need to keep their files private for competitive purposes.)

With the publication of the Third Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary already in progress -- on the Internet, rather than in print -- the need for skilled readers has never been greater. Many areas of American English need more thorough coverage, in particular the nonliterary sources that for years had been given short shrift, including diaries, letters, television scripts and song lyrics. And readers must now be attuned not only to the nuances of the English language but also to the details of computer markup languages so that they can keyboard citations in a format suitable for the O.E.D.'s databases.

It takes a tremendous amount of dedication and skill to be a citation reader, but a hard core has mastered the task and provides us with what we need to produce the dictionary. Lawyers, whether through chance or as a genuine result of training in the close reading of texts, have been some of the best contributors in recent years, but our team also includes a housewife, a retired Navy officer, several used-book store workers, a retired endocrinologist, the obligatory slew of Ph.D.'s in English and a stevedore with an abiding interest in late-18th-century correspondence.

With an editorial office in New York and more than 100,000 citations a year coming in to the Oxford English Dictionary's databases from American sources, Americans can feel confident that the Third Edition of the O.E.D., the first comprehensive revision in the dictionary's history, will finally do justice to our importance to the English language.

Jesse Sheidlower is the principal editor of the Oxford English Dictionary's North American Editorial Unit. William Safire is on vacation.